Although he has briefly alluded to their relationship before, Amis, 57, has never spoken in detail about his time with the woman who went on to be editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and the

New Yorker.

It began when Amis - who got a First in English from Exeter College, Oxford - was 23 and Brown was a 19-year-old student at St Anne's College,

Oxford.

His first novel, The Rachel Papers, would be published a year later. "The love affair with Tina Brown was a love affair," he wrote in his memoir, Experience, "but it was over too soon, as if something much longer had been confusingly

compressed into six or seven months."

Now he has told an American online magazine, Radar, of the feelings he had at the time and how until Brown, he had been unable to get a

girlfriend.

"She was and is adorable," he said. "She, sort of, rescued me. I don’t know if you've ever had one of those periods in your younger years when suddenly, not only are you not seeming to get a

girlfriend, but it's as if the women all know that you can't get a girlfriend.

"The news has got around that you're not going to get a girlfriend. I was going to write about this in an autobiographical novel I'm doing.

"I was beginning to understand what it must be like to be Philip Larkin - the women all know. I didn't actually fear it then; well, no, I did.

"I was just feeling, sort of, grubby and exasperated, it just gets worse and worse. The women all… it's as if they've all been ringing each other up and saying, "Don’t go near that guy".

"But Tina, sort of, saved me, because she was very pretty and ebullient and publicly affectionate.

"She got the scent off me and gave me confidence. That spell, she banished that. I don't think I’ve ever said this to a magazine before but that's what I think about it."

The spell banished, Amis went out with a number of other woman who were journalists or writers, including Emma Soames, Claire Tomalin and

Mary Furness.

He also developed something of a reputation as a lad about town, with a pinball machine in his kitchen but no stove.

Brown, now 53, went on to be an acclaimed young journalist and two years later began working for the Sunday Times under its editor Harold

Evans - the man who would later become her husband.

Evans was divorced from his first wife Enid, a teacher and magistrate, in 1978 and married Brown in 1981.

Amis, who wrote some of the most acclaimed novels of the 20th century, including Money and London Fields, has been married twice.

His first wife was Antonia Phillips, an American academic, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1996 and in 1998 he married the writer Isabel Fonseca. They have two daughters.